Re: THe OverRelational Manifesto (ORM)

Marshall Spight wrote:
> Bob Badour wrote:
> > Marshall Spight wrote:
> >
> > > This does not mean one cannot strongly refute others' ideas.
> > > But the above words don't address ideas at all, do they? They
> > > hypothesize qualities of the opposite speaker.
> >
> > When I use them, they are empirical observations. I don't know about
> > when others use them.
>
> They are not empircal observations about the people, because
> you can't observe the people. You can only observe their usenet
> posts. This is not sufficient to judge the individuals, but it is
> sufficient to judge the posts themselves.

Whoa, that is something nobody ever realized! Do you really think Bob or anyone else here cares about whether a person is an idiot in real life? A post in Usenet calling someone an idiot is based on the empirical observation: the content of his/her posts. Period.

And Bob does have a good eye in identifying the someone's intellectual mediocrity based on his/her very first few posts. I am often surprised to see so many here still encourage mediocrity by further engaging themselves seriously with such posts.

The problem with such engagement is that a naive reader who cannot distinguish usable material from nonsense can be misguided by the mediocre discussant's snobbery and articulation.

 Commenting on the
> posts, the ideas therein, etc. is perfectly fair game, and I am
> among the harshest critics of the *ideas* of some of the people
> whom you most revile. In fact, I daresay I am a much more
> *effective* deterrent to the adoption of those ideas by
> third parties than you are, because my refutations are
> substantive and address the ideas themselves, whereas your
> refutations are dominated by ad hominem insults, which intelligent
> people do not find persuasive.

Well, since "you can't observe the people" how do you know the above? You have poor logic faculties that prevent you from seeing what you write. The very fact that you diatribe extends this long itself is a testament to it.

>
> I will grant you that there is probably a class of person for
> whom the most convincing manner of argument is who yells
> the loudest or who insults the most unwaveringly, and that
> your methods are more likely to reach them than mine are.
> But I expect they are in short supply in this particular context,
> and I also expect they are not the sort of people whom you
> consider to be your natural constituency.
>

With nobody to counterpoint the nonsense forcefully like Bob does, chances are the likes of Neo can be markedly nominated as the ones capable "to discuss logic, type theory, formal methods, and relational aspects of same" than any of us.

>
> > > In fact, I believe the best way to raise the level of discourse
> > > on this newsgroup would be for extended further reading. In
> > > particular, I am thinking of Miss Manners. Once the basic
> > > material is mastered, we could move on to the advanced
> > > stuff, like transaction processing or type theory.
> >
> > If that is the case, why did you question [name deleted] legitimacy
> > as a contributor here?
>
> There was a while back an individual who was otherwise quite
> reasonable, who started to veer briefly into name calling. I
> dislike name calling,

[Excused]

>
> Wouldn't it be interesting if there was such a person, and we
> could see how you reacted to him? Yes, your reaction would
> be quite telling, I think. Oh, oh, wait, hang on, there *was*
> such a person who used to come here. Yes, and he was
> much better at formal methods, logic, etc. than either
> you or I. I remember now. His name was Costin Cozianu.
>

You are duped. All I can say is you have no clue who he is or what he does.

> How did you feel about him, Bob?
>
>
> Marshall
Received on Thu Apr 20 2006 - 15:51:26 CEST